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Words = Power

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For the final two weeks of my voice and speech class, each of us was meant to work with a specific text that we’d chosen. Not more than a few lines. My teacher said this could be dialogue, a presentation, poetry, song lyrics… whatever. The main criterion was the text should be something we knew well… and that each of us was comfortable delivering in class.

I began thinking about the text a couple of weeks ago when my teacher reminded us to have it ready. Almost immediately, I also began to think about how I could avoid the lines that would not stop going through my head. Surely, I thought, I can’t be comfortable with those words…

I’ve been circling this thought for weeks. The words that I can’t shake are a song lyric, beautiful in its phrasing and heavy with emotional freight. They are awful and beautiful at the same time. Awful, because I want with every fiber of my being to be the one who wrote them. Beautiful, because even without music, they sing.

And he was always much more human than he wished to be

Really, the verses pursue me. I’ve tried isolating bits of the lyric from the rest: experimenting with just two lines to use in class. Thinking, if I separate these threads, these veins that bleed into one another, the smaller fragment will be easier to contain. Easier to carry.

My mistake.

So I skulked the stacks in the drama and poetry sections of the library, in search of something memorable — something I could easily remember — which was also easier to carry, and easier to hear.

What I checked out was the following:

  • The Essential Dickenson (Emily)
  • Three plays by David Mamet

So much for happiness and froth. I wonder what this says about me…

All of my selections proved to be difficult at meeting my primary search criterion: text that was lighter than the haunted verses that wouldn’t leave me alone.

Emily is memorable, but her poems have a strength of structure that conspires against me. I’ve always had difficulty reading poetry aloud. I have to fight against being held hostage by the end of the line. Emily’s poetry is cadences of pure tensile strength… How can a little weakling like me begin to play with her text?

Mamet, on the other hand, has easy, flowing dialogue. But it’s nearly impossible to find speech that doesn’t carry dangerous, spiky undercurrents, even in the comedies.

Despite — or perhaps because of — the musculature in Emily’s poetry, I found it relatively easy to remember her verse. I really liked the start of this poem, particularly because I am a writer:

She dealt her pretty words like Blades–
How glittering they shone–
And every One unbared a Nerve
Or wantoned with a Bone–

The power of words! Who wouldn’t love to declaim those lines? Up until the very moment I stood up in class I was convinced those would be the words that passed my lips.

Didn’t happen that way. Instead, I went with a bit from the beginning of Eat, Pray, Love by Liz Gilbert. The book has a wonderful, gentle sense of humor, and I thought I could use that rather than the bare intensity in Emily’s lines. Back to eschewing the heavy stuff.

In the end, I chose the power verses for myself, but kept them secreted from the audience. I was afraid of the strength of those verses — could I contain them, could I embody them… could I handle their impact on the people who would hear me speak?

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What about you — can you think of a time when you pulled back from your own power?

Practicing with other artists: The best way to get past the anxiety of having to deliver

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Even horses know how to blow raspberries.
CC image “Silly Face Runner Up” courtesy of Linda Hartman on Flickr. Some rights reserved.

I thought I knew all about inflection.

In voice class this week, our teacher had us do an exercise with the tongue twister: Esau Wood sawed wood.  All the wood Esau Wood saw, Esau Wood would saw.

And so on.

We went around the circle one by one, playing with intonation, pauses, emphasis, volume. I was halfway around the circle, exactly opposite from the teacher, and so each time the chain began, I had the opportunity to hear half the group test out their voices before the old saw got to me.

Nothing like test prep when the questions are always the same! Or are they?

The first time around (“Esau Wood sawed wood”) I was prepared to be disappointed. Listening to everyone who came before me and hearing the adjustments our teacher was asking them to make, I mentally rehearsed my own delivery.

This can’t be hard, I thought to myself. I have experience reading aloud.

Not so.  My puffed-up pride landed flat on its face upon delivery. Yeah, the pauses were there… but I was rumbling in the fry, and apparently totally lacking in intonation.

Coming from a family of singers, the last bit particularly stung. And the “fry,” as I was coming to realize, was me hanging out in my chest space every time I spoke, rumbling away. James Earl Jones I am not. What was I doing there?

My teacher had me go over Esau wood sawed wood a few more times, and I overcompensated by getting really high-pitched at least once. The experience was a gentle reminder of the difference between practicing something by myself and for myself, and delivering in the spotlight when all eyes are on me.

This is one of the things that freaks me out about sharing my artistic work, and I suspect I’m not the only one who feels this way. There’s a difference between doing something for ourselves (“it’s fun, I’m playing, it’s just for me”) and presentation (“now, it’s official, and everyone else is going to have an opinion on it. Gulp!”).

I wrote a whole post on the need to just practice our art. But there comes a point where we’re going to want to show off our accomplishments, and I, for one, dislike the sensation of being like a deer in the headlights.

I love voice class. You might say the meeting is a masochistic experience, since I go in every week knowing I’m going to sound funny, I’m going to feel silly. But everybody else has to deal with the same expectation. We’re all in it together. I may have cornered the deal on pauses; but my neighbor’s voice sings in clear tones, no frying at all. And we all blow raspberries at the start of class and sometimes throughout the middle of the session, too. A bunch of adults, jumping up and down, shaking their heads and going “Bbbbbbbbbbbbbbrrrrrrrrrrrrrr! BBBBBbbbbbbbrrrrrrrrrrrrRRRRR!”

That’s one of the things I love about my writing workshop, too. We’re all in the fry together, shaking out our language and stretching it.

Being crazy in a group, I’m finding, is the easiest way for me to find my own voice.

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When was the last time you really allowed yourself to be silly?

Speaking the language

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Writing is like learning a foreign language: you have to practice to become fluent.

People think that learning a language is about vocabulary. Or that it’s about grammar, or having the correct/native accent. These are all desirable, but not the most crucial thing.

We’ve got to actually speak it.

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It sounds overly simplistic, I know. How do you learn a language? You speak it! But it’s true. Ask anyone who has ever tried to learn another language–I’m not talking about folks who have grown up multi-lingual, which is a different experience–and they can assure you that reading grammar rules are of limited usefulness in actual human interaction.

It’s hard, too. We’re stuck speaking it before we’re any good at it. Especially in the beginning, we work arduously to put sentences together that bear almost no relationship to a grammatical construct, and may make absolutely no sense when taken literally. The other difficulty is that we have to learn what other people are saying to us! It doesn’t help to be able to ask for directions and then not understand the answer (I should know; this is my experience with French).

Writing is like that, I think. We start writing before we know whether we’re any good. We don’t have the vocabulary. We haven’t mastered the grammar. Our accent and style fluctuate and often resemble nothing like what we are trying to emulate.

Sometimes this is really nasty. We may know how bad we are, or we may believe that we’re terrible; either way, we’re prone to a serious attack of writer’s block, and I have suffered from both causes.

Then, we’ve got to engage in dialogue. We have to find other people to look at what we’ve written and tell us about it. It’s the only way to get better. Writing without readers is like talking to ourselves. It gets boring, and it makes us look crazy. But people often (usually?) read our stuff while it’s imperfect, frequently a draft. Egad! Does it make any sense?!

This is why I’ve begun to love writing exercises. Or writing practice, if you prefer the yoga approach.

I try to write every day. Sometimes this takes the form of a journal entry. Sometimes it’s just me whining to myself about my life. Sometimes it’s a thought that caught my fancy, and I’m not sure where it goes; or a beautiful-sounding phrase; or new knowledge I’ve come across; or a book that I’m currently reading that really, REALLY wants feedback. (It does!) Sometimes I go for structure, and pick an exercise I’ve found in a writing book, and write for twenty minutes. Most of what comes out is free association.

A lot of the time, I don’t feel inspired while this is going on. I feel like my prose is clumsy. I’ve re-read passages later that I was actually proud of at the time of composition, and wondered whether I was lucid while writing. Egad! It doesn’t make sense.

But here’s the thing. No matter how reluctant I might be to actually pick up my pen (I do these the old-fashioned way), by the time I’m finished, I’m in great form, and usually have stirred up at least another half a dozen ideas that I want to continue writing about. In fact, I WANT to continue writing! Something, anything–sometimes even the very thing I’ve been free associating about.

Writing exercises loosen my tongue–so to speak.

Writing begets writing. It’s easier to do once we’ve already been doing it–just like speaking a foreign language is easier to do once we’ve been talking for a while.

I speak to practice being a better speaker.

I write to practice being a better writer.

It’s the only way to become fluent.